Social-Information Seeking in Development: The Child as Experimental Psychologist

Research has established that children are “naive psychologists,” adept at understanding and navigating the social world from an early age. However, most of this work has focused on how children process information that they acquire incidentally, for example, by passively observing others’ actions. Here, we draw on literature framing children as intuitive scientists who actively seek information and test hypotheses to propose a view of children as naive experimental psychologists. From this perspective, children play an active role in selecting and pursuing relevant social information (e.g., about agents’ goals, traits, or relationships), whereby their search strategies are influenced both by context and task demands, as well as their prior beliefs, concepts, and domain-specific naive theories. We argue that the particular challenges associated with learning and reasoning about other minds may necessitate that children leverage their active learning competences, and we outline how the social domain uniquely constrains and shapes the learning process. We review existing research on social-information seeking in children and adults and identify directions for future research, emphasizing that children’s developing social cognition should be understood in terms of the active, exploratory role they take in learning about and participating in the social world.